Gun Debate threads need to be narrow focused and preferably touch on new regulations or proposed regulations or cover some new aspect on guns themselves.
When starting a GD on guns, not only make it narrow focused but please immediately flag your OP so the GD mods are aware that your thread will need to be watched to stop the hijacks, whataboutisms and other derailments that always seem to happen.
We could also have one wide ranging Gun debate thread, where as long as posters debate the content of the posts and not attack other posters, the side issues are not modded. However, we would have to make it clear that this thread is open season and we don’t want to see flags for all the crap mentioned above. In other words, please don’t bug us with your petty squabbles and don’t attack other posters no matter how much you’re sure they’re idiots, evil, trolls or Satan Hitler Trump himself.
Please note, if we make this change or a similar change, we’re likely to shut down gun threads that don’t follow the rules we decide on.
Gun debates are feeling very tired, I don’t think we should prohibit them, but they need to less repetitious and less burdensome to the staff.
So yes, this is feedback time. I want to hear from the GD regulars and the other Mods.
I like it. The big difference is the notifying the mods so they can more easily moderate in time. I support having narrowly focused threads in general, and in possibly having one thread that is specifically about the full issue–where indeed you shouldn’t report people as long as they stick to the topic.
I would also suggest explicitly telling people to be quick to report things that go beyond the topic in the narrow scope of the narrow gun threads.
This touches on exactly what I didn’t like about the recent thread I started about guns, the one asking whether gun supporters think mass shootings are acceptable. I only wanted it to focus on one specific question - “how many shootings are too many?” - but then lo and behold, it then went right back into the same worn out old trite gun debate again.
I’m much more in favor of the narrowly defined thread than an omnibus thread. The omnibus would likely end up constantly referencing the same tired ruts, while a narrowly defined thread with ‘heads up’ moderation could invite discussion on specifics.
It might also be worthwhile in such threads if a mod superscript comment was included as a reminder from whichever mod responded to the self flag. Weird text somehow seems to draw the eye in ways that might get people to be more careful.
IMO your thread was poorly suited for being in Great Debates. As you describe it you weren’t interested in discussion, just polling. Isn’t that what IMHO is for?
As to this idea—I would generally say keeping a gun thread on topic is good, but I frankly don’t think they ran significantly more off topic than most threads. I frankly see this idea as deriving from this board’s anti-gun mentality and a desire to constrain any pro-gun arguments to such a narrow range of responses that pro-gun posters either have to willingly play antigun poster’s gotcha games, or ignore such threads entirely.
I believe gun threads get so many flags because antigun posters are prolific here and intentionally weaponize the flag system to suppress arguments they dislike.
I cautiously disagree M_H. I started a gun-tangential thread in MPSIMS a while back, which had 1.2k views if only 64 posts. We only had 1-2 posts that needed modding, and the party involved acknowledged it was a sensitive topic for them.
Which brings me back to the problem of gun threads. It is deeply emotional, on both sides, to some of the posters. This is by no means unique to the subject, but it’s always going to draw more flags, both justified and un-.
I agree with the OP’s suggestions, except that I’m not sure that a single open-ended gun debate thread is really necessary. We’ve rehashed the same tired old issues over and over again so often that it wouldn’t cover any new ground, and if there was some new perspective or fact that someone wanted to discuss, this would fall under the “narrow focus” rule and a thread could be started on that issue alone.
If someone wanted an overview of what those tired old issues are, they have only to go to any of the many gun threads we’ve already had, because in essence the operative principle here is this: any gun thread that goes on long enough eventually becomes the same gun thread. They almost become self-parodies. For example, I think the recently closed thread in GD, “Is there X amount of mass shootings that would change gun supporters’ minds …?” manages to rehash all the basic issues, as well as all the whataboutisms and bad arguments, and ultimately comes down to the fact that the pro-gun and anti-gun sides have fundamentally different values.
To reiterate part of what I previously said over in the Pit when we were discussing this:
I admit to being really conflicted about gun threads. On one hand, I do tend to get drawn into them. OTOH, every time I do I regret having wasted my time. And then it happens again …
… I honestly don’t know what to suggest about the future, because this isn’t like the ban on climate change denial as a “thrice-told tale”, where there is an objective truth. OTOH, open-ended gun debates rarely or never cover new ground. I think your idea of allowing gun-related threads but requiring them to stay focused [on some specific narrow issue] is probably best.
What a very strange point of view. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s been involved in these gun debates that they all eventually end up going over and over the same old ground. That being the case, it’s hard to see the OP’s suggestion as anything other than a fair and impartial attempt to impose some structure and discipline on how we handle gun-related discussions.
That literally describes a huge portion of this entire board’s posts. How many Trump threads for example ultimately just become bitch sessions about Trump? Usually with the same recycled quips and lines of innuendo and insults. Gun threads may annoy certain people more than the many other repetitive threads we have, I don’t know.
Of the “banned GD topics” list, 3 of them I think are banned for good reason–they are basically vehicles for extreme bigotry and just don’t belong on a forum that doesn’t want to house extreme bigotry (these are the Scientific Racism, Men’s Right’s, and Holocaust Denial bans), the other two, IMO are just topics that were always repetitive (9/11 Truther and Climate Change Denial.) I think both of those bans are a little more specious, so I’m not a huge fan of the topic bans in general–again, because as a long-time poster I frankly think there’s like 50 or 60 topics that are repetitively discussed to death, most of them don’t seem to occasion that much complaint because they maybe aren’t divisive, but repetitiveness is a lot of what keeps some of the various sub-forums and topics going.
I kinda get behind the 9/11 Truther ban nonetheless just as a general “Board Quality” issue, because that particular topic across the Internet, has a tendency to attract Day 1 troll accounts from all over just by existing here. Climate Change Denial threads imo should have been left in, I don’t think just because people are wrong and annoying, they shouldn’t be able to continue making their arguments, GD has a low volume of threads and most never get any traction at all, an occasional repetitive thread isn’t really a big deal as long as it’s not causing some sort of severe harm to the board as a whole.
Agreed. The largest problem with gun control threads is that the anti-gun/pro-control side often doesn’t understand much about firearms or the enforcement of such laws, while the pro-gun/anti-control side either doesn’t understand or care about why people want controls or have concerns about firearm-related violence, and as a result there is no real debate of any form but instead just people talking past one another that eventually degenerates into shit-slinging. The idea of narrowing the focus of a specific thread to one particular regulation or issue has merit, but I think should go even further and propose a particular structure to the debate such that there is a clear proposition, an opportunity for each ‘side’ to present their position and issues, and a chance to rebut without being shouted out. Also, I want a pony, and by that I mean a Boss 302 with a shaker-hood scoop.
Since I’m not getting a Mustang and I’m morally certain nobody is going to agree to these kinds of constraints, I suspect that the ‘narrow’ threads will die off quickly while the broad shitfest will proliferate indefinitely. I will continue to avoid such a thread because I have little patience for hypoerbole, determined ignorance, and the fundmentalist assertion that some abstract view of ‘rights’ means that we cannot do anything to address a violence problem that is at least an order of magnitude worse than any other developed nation because “America, fuck yeah!”
I feel like ending a topic due to “we’ve done it before” is unfriendly to potential new posters. I’m happy to do that if the topic is something that’s really offensive to many people, and attracts trolls (like “scientific racism”) but I’m not so on board with doing that for topics where feelings run hot, but both sides are pretty mainstream and include lots of otherwise good posters. I think gun control and abortion probably both fit the latter category.
Yeah, maybe you or I have said all we want to. And maybe we need to moderate to keep those passions from hijacking peripheral discussions. But I don’t think the topics should be banned, or restricted to only very narrow focussed discussions, over the entire board.
Very few GD threads generate the flags that gun threads do. Boths sides have those that love to declare the other side is trolling.
To be honest gun threads are a pain in the ass and if we need to be dragged into them, I would rather be on top of them from the beginning and keep them focused.
I think that is frankly because the anti-gun crowd fundamentally believes, for whatever reason, on this topic that the pro-gun disagreements are “invalid arguments” and/or “trolling.” Most of these arguments literally represent the mainstream of pro-gun arguments you can find on any message board or political debate, which to me means it is a pretty big leap to just label them all trolling or “off topic.”
I also think the actual ability to constrain to narrow topic, on a matter of significant political policy, just means you can’t really discuss it at all. The thread that prompted this, for example, if constrained exclusively to what OP wanted would have been nothing more than a poll of people saying “okay, 15 mass shootings is where I draw the line” and “There is no number that’s too high.” Back and forth. That isn’t a debate, and certainly isn’t an interesting discussion. The question of “how many mass shootings is too many” intrinsically relates to the whole gamut of the gun debate, it would be like saying “I want to discuss abortion rights but I don’t want any discussion about the state’s power to protect fetal rights.” Well, that is essentially the crux of that entire dispute, so have fun debating that.
Edit to add: I do agree gun threads here tend to be tedious and uninteresting, I don’t know that I had participated in one in maybe 5 years or more before this most recent one. I do not think any meaningful opinion changing or altering of views occurs in such threads–but I also hold a similar view to many topics discussed on these forums…part of the nice thing about a message board is you can pick and choose which topics to read.
I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the core issue. The core issue is well illustrated by our own back-and-forth in the aforementioned thread, “ Is there X amount of mass shootings that would change gun supporters’ minds …? ”. I think we had a good informative debate for awhile, but it ultimately came down to an intractable difference in very fundamental values, at which point one could sense both sides getting frustrated with each other, and that was the point where I bowed out.
Even the pattern of argumentation is generally very much the same. The gun control side cites statistics on gun violence and references comparisons with the rest of the developed world. The pro-gun side dismisses the statistics as meaningless and declares that, anyway, as American gun owners they couldn’t care less what the rest of the world is doing. Variants of this always reappear in almost every single gun thread.
Getting close to refighting the fights, rather than documenting the issues, so I’m being very careful here.
Neither side agrees on the same definitions, including terms such as assault rifles, mass shootings, and what constitutes firearm violence. And in many cases, the definitions being used are the same ones the press/politicians use, which again, are miles apart depending on your political agenda.
Thus the arguments come down to ‘the other side is lying/dishonest’ no matter what facts or figures you use.
A narrow argument would work much BETTER for this, so, for example, you wanted to argue about mass shootings you would specify WHICH of the many definitions of such to be used for the thread, and be able to discount arguments based on alternate definitions. Or you could have a thread about firearm fatalities that in the OP ruled out suicides. Or you could reverse the previous, and want to consider firearm fatalities that include suicides as an example of indirect harm to society.
Either way, better to do it upfront rather than have the OP declare halfway into the discussion they don’t want X/Y/Z to be considered, which in and of itself derails some of the threads.
I would certainly agree if someone were able to craft a very narrow OP that actually could be discussed, people should respect its parameters. I just think “how many mass shootings is too many” isn’t even remotely close to a good way to do that, that’s basically either one of two things: a poll, or a free-flowing gun discussion.
Better to look forward to a possible new paradigm than to refight the arguments of the past.
We could spend countless pages of digital ink refighting what has gone wrong in the past, which will quickly turn into a useless trudge breaking everyone’s hearts. I think we’re trying to work towards something, even if less-than-perfect, that will allow useful conversations in the future.
